The 60s – The Shape of Things to Come Part 4

We staggered out of 1968 and into 1969 to begin the trial of the Chicago 7 or 8 depending on where you plug into the story. It was the trial for those charged with crossing state lines to incite riots during the Democratic Convention. If you’ve watched any of the dramatizations, are old enough to have seen some of the actual coverage of the trial, or have read any about it you know that it was a circus and nothing more than a platform from which the defendants could continue with their anti-war protest.

The defense attorney for the seven was William Kunstler one time ACLU Director and a civil rights lawyer. His eulogy written by Ronald L. Kuby and recorded in the book: In Tribute: Eulogies of Famous People by Ted Tobias reads in part:

As the movement to end the war in Vietnam came under mounting governmental attack, Bill Kunstler pioneered new methods of defense – bringing streets into the courtroom, and the courtroom into the streets. While defending the Chicago Seven, he put the war in Vietnam on trial – asking Judy Collins to sing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” from the witness stand, placing a Viet Cong flag on the defense table, and wearing a black armband to commemorate the war dead.

That sums up the entire fiasco. Most of those tried were convicted but later cleared by the appeals courts. Some of the anti-establishment protestors went on to lucrative capitalist careers and teaching. Pat Hayden, former Jane Fonda husband, went on to be a California politician.

The Marxist/Socialist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) splintered and gave birth to other radical organizations one of which was The Weather Underground or Weathermen. Its prominent members, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, were somewhat in the news in recent years because they were friends and colleagues of Presidential Candidate Barack Obama. This terrorist group is credited with 25 bombings and the murder of two police officers and a Brink’s guard. In a New York Times column “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen” by Dinita Smith published September 11, 2001, Ayers said:

“I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970’s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago.

And where did the unapologetic domestic terrorist who regrets he didn’t bomb more spend his later years?

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ”Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at,” is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago .

Ayers is an anti-American, anti-military, self-professed small “c” communist, and terrorist living the dream and sharing his ideology with college kids.

Isn’t that a great segue into the Charles Manson cult murders? The peace and love generation meets psycho Charlie and his family of killers. Manson was a manipulator, the primary cult leader attribute, who gathered up followers whom he convinced to commit gruesome murders in his quest for “Helter Skelter” (from a Beatles tune). In his view, Helter Skelter was a race war where in the end, after all white people were dead, he and his band of merry psychos would emerge as leaders. The Manson cult committed the Tate – LaBianca murders on successive nights August 8 – 10 1969. Fashion model and actress Sharon Tate was 8 months pregnant when Manson’s killers repeatedly stabbed her in the stomach. The LaBianca murders were just as bad. Evil did and still does walk the face of this earth.